Vintage landscape: Bluff Hall gate

What a great old gate at Bluff Hall, Demopolis, Alabama, in 1936. I love the fat finials.

The playwright Lillian Hellman may have passed through this gate in the first decades of the 20th century. Her mother’s family was from Demopolis, and she visited there as a child. She later used the town as inspiration for the setting of The Little Foxes. Lionnet is said to have been based on Bluff Hall and another local mansion.

Today the house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is open to the public as a museum.

Photo: by Alex Bush for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.